Category Archives: television

By Agustin Palacio

Structured Stories is a news database under construction which intends to empower everyone to collect, use and improve a permanent record of news events. Creator David Caswell wants to switch the current approach to archives, which “is just not working”, for “some form of structured information that can be networked.”

According to Caswell, adding value to the structured narrative could be a way to return to something similar to the economic mechanism of the 20th century: a distribution-based bundle.

Most research on news consumption annoys me. Most research on news consumption – like Pew’s State of the News Media – relies on surveys of people self-reporting how they consume news. But surveys can only answer the questions that they ask. And as any journalist with a decent bullshit detector should know: the problem is people misremember, people forget, and people lie.

The most interesting news consumption research uses ethnography: this involves watching people and measuring what they actually do – not what they say they do. To this end AP’s 2008 report A New Model for News is still one of the most insightful pieces of research into news consumption you’ll ever read – because it picks out details like the role that email and desktop widgets play, or the reasons why people check the news in the first place (they’re bored at work, for example).

The awards cover Austria and Switzerland as well as Germany, and are organised by the European Web Video Academy, a group of German journalists and web enthusiasts based in Düsseldorf, directed by Markus Hündgen and Dimitrios Argirakos and supported by Julius Endert and Daniel Pahl (disclaimer: I’m working there at the moment).

Motion graphics has become an increasingly popular way to present data in a compelling visual form. In a series of videos guest contributor Sihlangu Tshuma outlines his workflow process for managing a motion graphics video project, the results of which are shown at the end. All 13 videos are also available in this playlist.